02/12/2025
You can stay in Beryl's childhood home at Kembu Cottages.
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At around noon on September 5, 1936, two fishermen in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, discovered a woman struggling through a peat bog.
She was covered in blood. Her white overalls were black with mud up to her waist. Behind her, a turquoise and silver airplane sat nose-down in the muck, tail pointing skyward.
"I'm Mrs. Markham," she told them. "I've just flown from England."
Beryl Markham, thirty-three years old, had just become the first person to fly solo nonstop from England to North America. She was also the first woman to fly the Atlantic east-to-west—the hard way, straight into the wind.
She didn't feel like a hero. She felt like a failure.
Her intended destination had been New York City. She'd crashed 600 miles short. In her mind, that meant she hadn't succeeded.
The world would disagree.
Twenty-one hours earlier, on September 4 at 6:50 p.m., Markham had taken off from RAF Abingdon in England. The weather forecast was terrible—heavy rain, low clouds, fog, gale-force winds. Several people had advised her to wait.
She'd already waited three days. She was done waiting.
The Percival Vega Gull she flew—a borrowed plane named "The Messenger"—was brand new but heavily overloaded. Two auxiliary fuel tanks filled the passenger compartment. Total capacity: 255 gallons. The plane needed every inch of Abingdon's mile-long runway to get airborne with that weight.
From the moment she lifted off, everything went wrong.
The rain was relentless. Within minutes, her carefully prepared navigation chart blew out the cockpit window. For the next twenty-one hours, she would fly by instruments alone.
She couldn't fly too high—the rain turned to ice. She couldn't fly too low—the winds threatened to force her into the sea. She stayed around 2,000 feet, threading an impossible needle between death by ice and death by drowning.
She'd hoped for moonlight to guide her across the black Atlantic. Instead, clouds blocked everything. For the entire crossing, she saw nothing but darkness, rain, and the dim glow of her instrument panel.
The headwinds were brutal. Her plane's cruising speed was 150 miles per hour. With the winds, her actual progress was barely 90.
She stayed awake on coffee and chicken sandwiches—the only food she'd packed for the flight. Twenty hours. No radio. No beacons. No way to call for help if something went wrong.
Then, around hour twenty, something went wrong.
The engine shuddered. Died. Sputtered back to life. Coughed black exhaust.
Markham had plenty of fuel. It had to be an airlock. She frantically worked the metal petcocks, trying to restore proper fuel flow. She cut her fingers on the metal. Blood dripped onto her maps and clothes.
The engine limped along. Barely running. She coasted forward on a dying motor, searching desperately for land.
Finally—daylight. And below her, the rocky, boulder-strewn coast of Nova Scotia.
She needed to land. Now.
She spotted what looked like a solid green field. It was her only option.
The plane dropped. Touched down.
And immediately nosed over into soft peat.
Markham's head smashed through the windscreen. Blood streamed down her face. For a moment, she was unconscious.
When she came to, she was trapped in the cockpit, sinking into bog mud.
She climbed out. Stood there, dazed, covered in blood and black peat. Alive.
She'd flown for twenty-one hours and twenty-five minutes across 3,600 miles of ocean. Most of it in darkness. All of it against the wind. The entire journey over unbroken water where a crash meant certain death.
And she'd survived by landing in a bog.
At a nearby farmhouse, she asked for a cup of tea and a telephone.
When she called to report her position, she considered herself a failure. New York had been the goal. She hadn't reached it.
But within hours, the world told her otherwise.
The feat she'd accomplished was extraordinary. Charles Lindbergh had been the first to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1927—but he'd gone west-to-east, with the prevailing winds. Amelia Earhart had flown solo in 1932—also west-to-east, the easier direction.
No one had successfully flown nonstop from England to North America. No woman had conquered the Atlantic flying east-to-west against those brutal headwinds.
Until Beryl Markham.
Congratulations poured in from around the world.
Amelia Earhart told the New York Times: "I'm delighted beyond words that Mrs. Markham should have succeeded in her exploit and has conquered the Atlantic. It was a great flight."
Coming from Earhart—aviation royalty—that meant everything.
A day later, Markham arrived in New York. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia gave her a hero's welcome with a motorcade through Manhattan. Crowds lined the streets. Photographers swarmed. She was given a suite at the Ritz-Carlton.
"America," she pronounced, "is jolly grand."
But who was this woman who'd just rewritten aviation history?
Beryl Markham wasn't American. She wasn't even from New York's flying elite.
She was a colonial kid from Kenya, raised barefoot in the African bush.
Born in England in 1902, she'd moved to British East Africa at age four when her father established a horse-racing farm. Her mother, hating the isolation, returned to England almost immediately. Beryl stayed with her father.
She grew up speaking Swahili, hunting with Kipsigis tribesmen, learning to track warthogs with a spear. At eighteen, when her bankrupt father left for Peru, she took over training his racehorses—becoming the first woman in Africa to earn a racehorse trainer's license.
Then she learned to fly.
In 1929, at twenty-nine, she became Africa's first female commercially licensed pilot. The certification required her to completely strip and rebuild an airplane engine. She worked as a bush pilot, spotting elephants for safari hunters, flying mail and medicine to remote mining camps across terrain marked "UNSURVEYED" on maps.
She flew with no radio, no beacons, often at night across the desert. If she crashed in the bush, there was no way to call for help. Several pilots she knew had died that way.
In 1936, when she decided to take on the Atlantic, several people had already died attempting the east-to-west crossing. Everyone said it was too dangerous. The headwinds were too strong. The fuel calculations too tight. The weather too unpredictable.
Markham didn't care about what everyone said.
She borrowed a plane, filled it with fuel tanks, and pointed it west.
Twenty-one hours later, covered in blood and mud, she'd proven them all wrong.
Her achievement placed her alongside Lindbergh and Earhart as one of aviation's greatest pioneers. In an era when women faced enormous barriers in flying, Markham had accomplished something even Earhart hadn't: the brutal east-to-west crossing.
Years later, she'd write about her adventures in "West with the Night," a memoir that Ernest Hemingway would call "a bloody wonderful book." He wrote to his editor: "She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer."
The book sold modestly in 1942, then vanished. It wasn't rediscovered until 1983, when a California restaurateur found Hemingway's letter and tracked down the out-of-print memoir. The reissue made Markham, then eighty, famous all over again.
She died in Kenya in 1986 at age eighty-three, having lived long enough to see her aviation feat finally celebrated.
But that September day in 1936, standing in a Nova Scotia bog asking for tea, she couldn't see any of that coming.
She just knew she'd missed New York by 600 miles.
The world knew differently.
She hadn't just crossed an ocean. She'd redefined what was possible—showing that sometimes the hardest paths yield the greatest victories, and that "failure" is just a matter of perspective.
Would you have had the courage to fly into a storm everyone warned you against—knowing several people had already died trying?
